Crime at Bedtime

The Acid Bath Murders are one of the most infamous cases in British criminal history, and the man behind them, John George Haigh, believed he had discovered the secret of the perfect crime. A charming, softly spoken fraudster who presented himself as a gentleman and an engineer, Haigh murdered at least six people in 1940s England for their money, and then dissolved their bodies in drums of concentrated sulphuric acid. He did it because he was convinced of one thing: that without a body, there could be no conviction for murder. He had misunderstood the law, catastrophically. And he had also overestimated his acid. When his final victim, a wealthy widow named Olive Durand-Deacon, vanished after a visit to his Sussex workshop, a brilliant Home Office pathologist named Keith Simpson was called in, bent down in the yard outside, and picked up what looked like an ordinary pebble. It was a human gallstone. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Acid Bath Murders: the six victims, the charming killer who thought he was untouchable, the fatal misunderstanding at the heart of his method, the gallstone and the set of dentures that the acid could not destroy, the transparent vampire performance he gave to try to escape the gallows, and the swift justice that followed. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the pebble in the yard.
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The mystery of Kaspar Hauser has haunted Europe for nearly 200 years, and it began on a spring afternoon in 1828 when a bewildered teenage boy appeared in the streets of Nuremberg, barely able to speak. He carried two letters and a single strange request: he wanted to be a cavalryman, like his father. He could not use a candle without burning himself. He recoiled from meat and drank only water. And when he could finally tell his own story, it was almost unbelievable: he claimed to have spent his entire life imprisoned alone in a darkened cell, never seeing another human face. Kaspar Hauser became a sensation across Europe, and a theory soon took hold that he was a stolen prince, the true heir to a German throne, hidden away by a ruthless plot. Five years later he was stabbed to death in circumstances that have never been explained. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story of Kaspar Hauser: the boy who came from nowhere, the letters that may have been forged in his own hand, the lost-prince theory, the mirror-writing note found beside his dying body, the question of whether he was murdered or died by his own hand, and the remarkable DNA analysis of 2024 that finally answered one question about him while leaving the deepest mystery exactly as it was. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the riddle of his time.

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The murder of Kim Wall in August 2017 was one of the most shocking crimes in modern Scandinavian history, and it began with an interview. Kim Wall was a brilliant and fearless 30-year-old journalist, a Swedish reporter who had filed award-winning stories from North Korea, Cuba, Haiti, and the nuclear-scarred atolls of the Pacific. On the evening of the 10th of August 2017, she boarded a homemade submarine in Copenhagen harbour to interview its inventor, a celebrated Danish engineer named Peter Madsen. She sent her boyfriend a photograph of herself smiling aboard the vessel. It is very probably the last photograph ever taken of her. The submarine did not return that night, and what followed was a case that gripped the world: a sunken submarine, a shifting series of lies, and one of the most painstaking forensic recoveries in Danish history. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the murder of Kim Wall: who she was and the extraordinary journalism she left behind, the inventor who lured her aboard, the three contradictory stories he told as the evidence closed in, the trial that saw through every one of them, the confession he finally gave three years later, and the memorial fund her family created so that her voice would not be silenced after all. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the last assignment of Kim Wall.
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The case of Brian Mwenda captivated Kenya and much of the world in 2023: the story of a confident young man in a well-cut suit who stood up in the High Court of Kenya, argued cases against trained lawyers, and, according to the viral legend, won every one, despite, the Law Society of Kenya alleges, never having been a lawyer at all. It is a story of two men with almost the same name. One, Brian Mwenda Ntwiga, was a genuine, fully qualified advocate whose professional identity sat dormant in an online database. The other, Brian Mwenda Njagi, allegedly hijacked that identity, took over the account, and walked into the highest courts in the land. When the Law Society of Kenya publicly declared him a masquerader, the nation split in two: lawyers were outraged, but much of the public celebrated him as a folk hero who had exposed the emptiness of professional gatekeeping. In this episode of Crime at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Brian Mwenda case: the alleged scheme, the viral claim of twenty-six courtroom victories that the Law Society itself disputed, the real lawyer whose identity was stolen, the arrest, the not-guilty plea, and the genuinely uncomfortable questions the whole affair raised about credentials, competence, and who really gets to call themselves a professional. This is a case that, at the time of recording, remains unresolved, and we have told it as fairly as we can. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the advocate who wasn't.
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The Zodiac Killer ciphers are among the most famous unsolved codes in the world, and after more than fifty years, two of them have still never been cracked. Between 1969 and 1970, the unidentified serial killer who called himself the Zodiac sent four coded messages to San Francisco newspapers, each a block of strange symbols mixing letters, numbers, and astrological signs. He promised that his codes would reveal his identity. The first cipher, 408 characters long, was solved in about a week by a schoolteacher and his wife at their kitchen table, but it revealed only a chilling boast, not a name. The second, known as Z340, defeated the FBI, the NSA, and the world's best codebreakers for 51 years, until an international team of three amateurs finally cracked it in December 2020, one of them working through Melbourne's COVID lockdown on the far side of the world. And two ciphers remain unsolved to this day, including a 13-character message that the Zodiac introduced with the words "My name is". In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the Zodiac ciphers: how the codes worked, who solved them, why the last two may be impossible to crack, and the genuinely haunting possibility that the name of a killer who was never caught has been sitting in plain sight, printed on a newspaper page, for more than half a century, in a code that no one has ever been able to read. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the unread message.
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